Читать книгу The Untold Story of Shields Green - Louis A. Decaro Jr. - Страница 11

Materials from which to furnish a sketch of this courageous Martyr for Freedom are meagre indeed.

Pine and Palm, 1861

The quest to learn about Shields Green is frustrating, especially because the pursuit of evidence seems to raise new questions beyond those that originally were asked by historians. For instance, there is no doubt that his early life and upbringing took place in Charleston, South Carolina. “He had been brought up in the city,” recalled Owen Brown, his traveling companion.1 This means that Green does not conform to the stereotype of the agrarian slave that is most familiar in popular thinking. In a real sense, Green was far more an urban figure than even Frederick Douglass, who knew both the agrarian and urban experience in slavery. But neither was Green unusual in this regard, since, as will be shown below, he was among a significant number of African Americans in the Lower South, half of whom lived in urban centers in the mid-nineteenth century.2 Yet the particulars of his early life in Charleston remain out of reach.

There is no reason to doubt the tradition that Shields Green had been a married man with a young son prior to his flight from the South. In this tradition we rely upon the testimony of Anne Brown Adams, the daughter of John Brown, who stayed for a time with her father and the raiders prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid.3 Based upon what Green told her, Anne wrote that he had escaped from Charleston in a “sailing vessel loaded with cotton” bound for New York City, where he was “stowed away by one of the hands” and “aided by friends upon arrival.” She said that Green told her that he had left a young son behind when he fled, and that his wife had died prior to his escape.4 These few details are priceless, but they also raise questions. Benjamin Quarles suggested that the death of Green’s wife had “spurred on” his escape.5 This is dramatic, but nothing in the record suggests that her death had anything to do with his decision to flee from South Carolina.

As to his family life in the South, we do not know, for instance, whether Green’s wife was enslaved or free. Free and enslaved blacks “commonly joined together as man and wife.”6 However, without sufficient information, Green’s unfortunate spouse remains anonymous to history. To compound the problem, although Anne Brown Adams claimed that Green’s wife had died prior to his flight from the South, we do not know the year of his departure. If, for example, his escape from Charleston took place between 1854 and 1855, then his wife might be one of three black women listed as having died just before this period. Of the three, one was enslaved and two were free.7 Without any certainty as to the identity of Green’s wife or the date of her death, it seems impossible to date his flight from the South. Evidence of his presence in the North may put us closer to an estimate of his departure from South Carolina, although even here it remains inconclusive.

According to the Rochester Democrat in 1859, Green made his first appearance in Rochester, New York, about three years prior to the Harper’s Ferry raid, after which he went to Canada, and then returned to the city in the spring or summer of 1858.8 This would set Green’s first appearance in Rochester at about 1856, although this is not adequate to determine the date of his escape, since he may have wandered elsewhere through the Northern states prior to his first arrival in Rochester.

* * *

Frederick Douglass wrote that Shields Green “called himself by different names,” including “Emperor.”9 However, since the 1970s, frequently it has been reported by historians that his real name was Esau Brown. The contemporary source of this claim is the invaluable study Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown (1974) by the eminent African American scholar Benjamin Quarles. However, the claim has not been sufficiently examined over the past half century, particularly given the fact that the citation actually was omitted from the book, through an oversight by either Quarles or his editor.

In preparing Allies for Freedom, Quarles clearly uses Anne Brown Adams as a source, along with an article in the Rochester Democrat, dated October 21, 1859, and its republication in the New York Daily Tribune on the following day.10 While these sources are vital, neither makes reference to Green’s real name having been Esau Brown. Most recently, journalist Eugene Meyer has extended this assumption in his narrative, Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army (2018). Relying on the assumption as conveyed by scholars since the time of Quarles, Meyer goes so far as to venture that Green’s former master may have been a Charleston slaveholder named Alexander H. Brown.11 While this is a reasonable conjecture, the question remains whether there is sufficient evidence that Esau Brown was Green’s actual name.

As it turns out, the original source for the claim—and likely the one that Quarles omitted from his manuscript—was an article in the Pine and Palm published in 1861. The Pine and Palm was the undertaking of the zealous abolitionist James Redpath, who knew John Brown and had published his official biography the year before. John McKivigan, Redpath’s biographer, says the Scotsman purchased the Weekly Anglo-African early in 1861, renamed it the Pine and Palm, and placed it under the charge of a nominal black editor named George Lawrence in New York City. As a measure of control, Redpath “dispatched his old friend Richard J. Hinton to work with Lawrence.” Primarily, the Pine and Palm functioned as a means for Redpath, who was based in Boston, to advocate for immediate emancipation and black emigration to Haiti, and he maintained a strong control of the paper in advancing his agenda.12

The Esau Brown claim is found in an unsigned article entitled “Shields Green,” which provides both trustworthy and questionable information.13 The article was based upon information provided to Redpath by the abolitionist William C. Nell, who admitted that he did not know the raiders but had gathered the information from “friends with some materials.” Nell’s “friends” with “materials” are unknown, and the article itself is probably edited heavily or actually written by Redpath based upon his notes.14 The Pine and Palm piece states that in Charleston, South Carolina, Green “was there known as Esau Brown, but on reaching the North he assumed the name of Shield Emperor.” It also claims that Green had fled from South Carolina early in the year 1859—this error afterward having been picked up by Frederick Douglass, who told a Massachusetts audience in 1873 that Green was “only a year from slavery in South Carolina” when he had joined John Brown. Fortunately, Douglass did not continue to repeat this error in later speeches or in his autobiography.15 In 1859 the Rochester Democrat stated that Green had been in the vicinity of Rochester (including Canada) for a few years. The Pine and Palm article itself provides a full transcription of Green’s Rochester business card with a date well over a year before the Harper’s Ferry raid:

Clothes Cleaning

The undersigned would respectfully announce that he is prepared to do clothes cleaning in a manner to suit the most fastidious, and on cheaper terms than any one else.

Orders left at my establishment, No. 2 Spring Street, first door west of Exchange Street, will be promptly attended to.

I make no promises that I am unable to perform.

All kinds of Cloths, Silks, Satins, &c., can be cleaned at this establishment. SHIELD EMPEROR.

Rochester, July 22d, 1858.16

The Pine and Palm article certainly raises important questions pertaining to Green’s story, such as the claim that he had made friends in Philadelphia, and whether he had first heard of John Brown through Douglass in Rochester or while he was in Canada. Primarily, however, one must ask, if Green’s actual name was Esau Brown, why does every contemporary source refer to him as either Shields Green or Emperor? Whatever Redpath’s basis was for the Esau Brown notion, it seems dubious, perhaps little more than hearsay. Although Redpath served history well by preserving Green’s business card in the Pine and Palm, his article otherwise is more a homage than a well-substantiated record.

To no surprise, the only other place where Green is referred to as Esau Brown is in a piece that probably was based upon the one in the Pine and Palm. In a 1907 article in the Washington Bee, the alleged real name of Shields Green is mentioned in the context of a dinner meeting of the Pen and Pencil Club in Washington, a private social organization of journalists. The article describes a gathering dedicated to the ninetieth anniversary of the birth of Frederick Douglass, who had died twelve years before. Among the toasts to be given at the affair was one by the abolitionist’s own son, sixty-six-year-old Lewis Douglass. His toast reportedly was entitled, “Esau Brown, martyr, one of John Brown’s men.” Unfortunately, Lewis was sick that evening and could not present his toast in person, and so it was submitted in writing and apparently read by someone else before the meeting. The reporter who covered the event for the Bee stated only that all the speeches were well received but provided no further description of the Douglass toast.17 In retrospect, however, the younger Douglass was merely echoing Redpath’s speculation, even appropriating his martyr title from the 1861 Pine and Palm article.

In his last memoir, Frederick Douglass described Green as “a colored man who called himself by different names.”18 However, “Shield Emperor,” the name he used on his business card in Rochester, seems only a variation of his real name, Shields Green. Douglass himself makes no mention of Esau Brown, instead referring to him—in all of his speeches over many years and in his autobiography—as Shields Green. Indeed, in all of the reportage from the time of the raid, Green never was identified as Esau Brown and never was quoted as referring to himself by this name. Furthermore, none of his recorded Harper’s Ferry associates, including Anne Brown Adams, ever referred to Shields Green as Esau Brown. Finally, none of the most detailed researchers of John Brown ever seem to have found evidence for the Esau Brown notion. Katherine Mayo, whose expansive research made it possible for Oswald Garrison Villard to publish his magisterial biography of Brown in 1910, never mentions Esau Brown in her field notes and interviews. Neither, apparently, did Boyd Stutler, the “godfather” of John Brown researchers in the later twentieth century. Considering the absence of any other reference besides the Pine and Palm article and its probable reiteration in 1907, it is doubtful that Esau Brown was Green’s real name. Perhaps this was one of his traveling names, although its apparent absence from the record makes even this possibility uncertain.

* * *

Although the popular narrative does not provide a detailed physical description of Shields Green, it correctly describes him as a strapping black man. Green evidenced no “mixed” family heritage, unlike some of the other black raiders who were considered “mulatto.” He was described by one white Virginian as being “dark copper-colored,” and by a white Baltimore journalist as “quite a black Negro.”19 The notion put forth by Quarles, that Green called himself Emperor because he believed himself to be the descendant of an African prince, is thoughtful speculation.20

Of all people, a physician named Alban Payne (whose pen name was Nicholas Spicer) who espoused “scientific” knowledge of alleged black inferiority, provided another physical description of Shields Green. Payne described him as “a negro with a thick, broad neck” and as “uncommonly strong and active.” After visiting him in jail, Payne concluded that Emperor had “the appearance of being as tough as a ‘pine knot.’”21 In fact, Payne’s description is more reliable than a more familiar one provided by the antislavery journalist Richard Hinton, written long after the Harper’s Ferry raid. Hinton, who was an antislavery racist like many others in his time, seems never to have seen Green in person, but presumptively described him in bigoted caricature as “the negro man with Congo face . . . and huge feet.”22

* * *

Although Shields Green’s origin in slavery is a reasonable conclusion of historians, this point too is open to question. Certainly, Green knew the pangs of oppression in the South, but his experience probably is more nuanced in historical terms. While incarcerated in Virginia, Green and the other raiders were interviewed by a man whose description of the prisoners appeared in a New York publication, Spirit of the Times, in early December 1859. After describing the black Ohioan John Copeland, the writer summarily reported: “Shields Green, the other black, born, he says, in South Carolina of free parents.”23 This heretofore unknown statement in which Green himself claims free parentage requires us to reconsider his background in South Carolina, as well as the circumstances that brought about his flight to the North.

Certainly, there is no reason to doubt the truthfulness of the report. Neither the writer (known to us only as “J.T.”) nor Shields Green himself had any reason to lie about having had free parents in the South. In fact, Green probably had revealed his free parentage to his lawyer, who may have chosen to keep the point hidden during the trial.24 By doing so, Green’s lawyer could undermine the count of treason against him because the court found that slaves were not citizens and therefore could not commit treason. After his trial, Green may have found some satisfaction in announcing his freeborn status to Southern visitors.

Green’s claim of free parentage may be accepted, although none of the available records from this period thus far examined either verify or contradict it.25 Assuming his words to be true, however, his flight from the South more likely was a reaction to a changed condition in his status, perhaps one that reflected the racist realities of antebellum South Carolina. In other words, what if Shields Green had lived in South Carolina as a free man, but somehow had found himself threatened with imprisonment or even enslavement? Might not such tragic circumstances have prompted him to flee the South?

As Ira Berlin observed in his seminal work, Slaves without Masters, “Southern free Negroes balanced precariously between abject slavery, which they rejected, and full freedom which was denied them.”26 Berlin’s study, which highlights the differences between slavery in the Upper and Lower South, is useful in understanding Green’s original context. In South Carolina, like the rest of the Lower South, freemen lived in a tenuous position between whites and their enslaved black brethren, a position that “allowed them just enough room to create their own life under the hateful glare of whites and within the slave society.” Unless self-employed, free blacks often were obligated to hire themselves out to whites who exploited their labor and deducted expenses from their salaries, often ensnaring them in “perennial indebtedness.” If a free black man like Green had found himself either deeply in debt or involved in some other legal problem involving fines, taxes, or jail fees, he would have been imprisoned and possibly sold into virtual slavery without hope of relief or deliverance.27 Likewise, in his vital study Black Charlestonians, Bernard Powers Jr. affirms that, apart from the experience of the most elite free blacks, free persons of color in Charleston led an “imperiled” existence. Not only could they be legally sold into slavery due to the aforementioned financial and legal burdens that were imposed upon them, but sometimes they were also kidnapped and sold into slavery.28

According to an abolitionist who knew him after he had fled to the North, Green told her, “I have suffered cruel blows from men who said they owned me.”29 These words might just as likely have come from a freeman who had fallen prey to slavery’s grip than from one born into slavery. In the late antebellum era, free people of color in the South found themselves increasingly under assault as both previously unenforced laws and new laws were imposed upon them, restricting every aspect of black life.30 Free blacks convicted of crimes were punished more harshly; for failure to pay city taxes, for example, they were subject to extended periods of forced labor, whereas whites were issued fines. Charleston’s free black men between the ages of twenty-one and sixty had to pay a tax of ten dollars if they practiced any kind of trade or art in the city. Likewise, free black males between eighteen and fifty years of age were subjected to a poll tax of two dollars. If a free black man failed to pay this tax, he could be handed over to the sheriff, who was then authorized “to sell him for a period of service not more than five years, sufficient to pay the costs.”31 While enslaved people were routinely beaten, in the 1850s free blacks increasingly were also whipped for violations that whites were only fined for committing. As Leonard P. Curry concluded, free blacks now “lived between two worlds with an unsteady foot in each.”32

Perhaps Shields Green, born free in Charleston, had somehow found himself in a situation where he was jailed, whipped, and vulnerable to some sort of indentured enslavement. Whether or not he was permanently reduced to the status of slavery or subjected to an extended time of servitude is not clear, although Emperor found the injustice of this treatment intolerable and decided to flee. At this point, too, his manner of flight—as a stowaway on a ship loaded with cotton and bound for New York City—bears consideration, for it may reflect the means by which he had fallen victim to slavery as a freeman.

Recall that Frederick Douglass was able to secure his freedom in 1838 by borrowing a free black sailor’s papers, and jumping aboard a northbound train from Baltimore, then going by steamboat to Philadelphia, and thence to New York City. Douglass noted that sailors enjoyed popular favor at the time in Maryland, and that the conductor so readily trusted “the sailor’s protection” in lieu of free papers, that he was able to make the risky sojourn to freedom.33 Green apparently also drew upon the assistance of black seamen, but under very different circumstances.

By the later years of the antebellum era, many states in the Lower South were highly suspicious of free black mariners, particularly South Carolina, which remembered their association with the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 in Charleston. Beginning with South Carolina, many slave states had passed Seaman Acts, based upon the popularly held belief that the influence of free black sailors upon enslaved people was tantamount to a “moral contagion.” The Seaman Acts functioned as “quarantines,” whereby free black sailors were immediately detained when coming ashore in port cities like Charleston. Despite this white fixation on keeping “vulnerable” slaves from being exposed to free black sailors, the detainment facilities for free black sailors were also used to imprison delinquent local slaves and free people of color. The contradictions of this racist practice are evident, not only in that both free and enslaved blacks were exposed to the “morally contagious” black seamen while in detention, but also that enslaved black sailors were not detained.34 In Charleston, had Shields Green actually been arrested and jailed due to unfortunate circumstances, he would have been incarcerated in the looming, cheerless, and rat-infested city jail, exposed not only to criminals of all stripes, but also to free black sailors and white Charleston’s other black victims.35 Certainly, in order for him to have gained access to a sailing ship bound for New York City, most likely he had made connections with blacks on board, either free or enslaved. Did he come into contact with a “morally contagious” free black sailor under detention, and was it through this contact that he arranged to be smuggled aboard?

As to Emperor’s former life as a freeman in the Lower South, consideration of other details may provide insight, such as his apparent education. Benjamin Quarles not only assumed that Green was born in slavery, but attributed illiteracy to him—once more reflecting an uncritical dependency upon the 1861 Pine and Palm article, which stated that he was illiterate.36 But since Green had been reared as a freeman, it is more likely that at least he had some basic schooling, certainly beyond what would have been allowed of an enslaved man. The interviewer J.T. described Green as showing “a good countenance, and a sharp, intelligent look,” concluding that he was “not much inferior to Fred. Douglass in mind or education.”37 The comparison with Frederick Douglass probably was intentional, given that by the time of the interview, it is likely that Green’s association with the famous abolitionist had become known. In contrast, another interviewer was determined to belittle Green, as if to spite that same association. The physician Alban Payne was eager to pronounce Green as showing “no evidence of either education or intelligence.” But the racist forgot himself, afterward mentioning that Green was “said to be finely educated.”38

Of course, even if some Virginians thought that Shields Green was “finely educated,” they were speaking in the context of racist realities, not the norms of white society. More likely, Green’s schooling was incomplete, commensurate with the tenuous existence he had known in Charleston. Just as his economic and political condition reflected the restrictions forced upon free blacks in the Lower South, so perhaps the limitations imposed upon his schooling also reflect his precarious existence in a racist, slavery-based society. One snobbish Virginia clergyman, who had ministered to him in his final days, thus adjudged Green “an uneducated Negro.” Likewise, after his death, a journalist from the Richmond Daily Dispatch repeated another report that called Green illiterate.39 But the notion of Green’s illiteracy may have been based on prejudice, given that he was a dark-skinned man who was not well spoken, and who was presumed to have been a slave.

In her later years, Anne Brown Adams seems to have lacked the kind of empathy for black people demonstrated by her father and mother, and sometimes even conveyed the impression that they owed her a measure of fealty and support.40 Reading over her several reminiscences of the Harper’s Ferry raiders, one can also see that she tended to favor the white men, of whom she could write about passionately and extensively when asked. In fairness to Anne, however, three of the raiders were her brothers, and two of the black raiders (John Copeland and Lewis Leary) did not even join Brown and his men until after she had left her father and returned home in September 1859. In the 1890s, when she was asked to provide reminiscences of the Harper’s Ferry raiders, Anne felt constrained to make her own search for information about Brown’s black raiders by soliciting sources in Ohio.41

Yet even if Anne’s reminiscences of Brown’s black men were as benign as they were brief, her remarks about Shields Green are the least flattering. Indeed, in every reference to him, Anne tended to present Green as having been something of a nuisance while at Brown’s Maryland farmhouse prior to the raid. Based upon her reminiscences, it seems that Emperor was either always in her way or tediously rambling on, to her annoyance. Belittling even his efforts at conversation, she wrote to Franklin Sanborn that Shields Green was “a perfect rattlebrain in talk.”42 In another remembrance from the 1890s, she relayed an incident that took place prior to her departure from Maryland, when Green attempted to make something of a farewell speech. “It was the greatest conglomeration of all the big words in the dictionary, and out, that was ever piled up,” she recalled. According to Anne, even fellow raider Osborne Anderson had jested that “God Almighty could not understand” Green’s speech.43 But if Green was aspiring to use words in the dictionary, maybe he could read one too. In his own reminiscence of the Harper’s Ferry raid, Osborne Anderson made no such jest about Shields Green. Nor did Frederick Douglass, who described him rather as dignified, yet as “a man of few words” whose “speech was singularly broken.”44 Taken together, these descriptions suggest that despite his desire to learn, it is more likely that Shields Green had labored under the deficiencies of an uneven schooling, or may have struggled with a speech impediment or even a learning disability. That he has been portrayed as illiterate in history seems to be a notion partially rooted in the unreliable Pine and Palm article—the same source that gave us the doubtable tale of Esau Brown the runaway slave.

Another hint at Green’s former status may be found in the kinds of livelihoods he sustained after he had fled the South. During an extended stay in Canada, he worked as a waiter. In Rochester, New York, he assumed proprietorship of a clothes cleaning business.45 (Certainly it is quite possible that Green himself wrote the draft for the printer who published his business card.) After his arrest at Harper’s Ferry, one journalist who interviewed Green identified him as a barber by trade, and following his death, another reporter noted that he had been a “journeyman barber.”46 Restaurant service, clothes cleaning, and barbering were among a number of livelihoods typically carried on by free blacks in the North and the South in that era. Berlin notes that in the South there was a variety of “drudgery jobs” that working-class whites either avoided or conceded to free blacks in order to elevate their status. These jobs, derogatorily referred to as “nigger work,” ranged from serving as coachmen and stable hands to food service, tailoring, barbering, and other roles that whites preferred not to undertake for themselves.47 Green seems to have had a varied skill set, which may further suggest his original status as a freeman in Charleston.

Another detail that bears reconsideration is Green’s age at the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid in 1859. Traditionally, it has been presumed that he was a young man in his twenties at the time, especially by Benjamin Quarles, who referred to Green as being twenty-five years old—once more based upon the unreliable reportage in the Pine and Palm.48 Certainly, a few newspaper reports at the time did describe him as a young man in his twenties, although no definitive age was ever established by reporters.49 As a man of dark complexion, Emperor more likely had a youthful appearance. Still, at least one interviewer concluded, “Green is a dark negro about 30 years of age.”50 In this light, estimation of Emperor’s age at the time of the raid cannot rely alone upon random newspaper descriptions.

Another source that has been taken as evidence for Green’s youth is a letter written by John Brown Jr. on August 11, 1859, still fresh from a meeting with Frederick Douglass in Rochester. Writing to John Henrie Kagi, Brown’s trusted agent in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, John updated him on the upcoming meeting between the Old Man and Douglass later that month. “The friend at Rochester will set out to make you a visit in a few days,” he wrote. “He will be accompanied by that ‘other young man,’” referring to Shields Green.51 However, the phrase “other young man” is only a veiled reference to Green as a recruit. As age goes, there is no literal intent in John’s words since, if Green was the “other young man,” then the first “young man” was forty-one-year-old Frederick Douglass. Richard Hinton seems to have missed this in taking these words literally, although John clearly placed them within quotation marks.52 There are yet other reasons for suggesting that Shields Green was older than what has been presumed by historians, including the conclusion of an elusive genealogical researcher.53 Certainly, as observed in chapter 6, the best sketches of Emperor made from life suggest that he was not a twenty-something youth at the time of his death. While it is not yet possible to determine Green’s actual age, it is far more reasonable to assume that he was in his mid-thirties at the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid.

* * *

A survey of contemporary newspaper accounts shows that much of the reporting about Brown and his men after the raid mainly was picked up from major New York papers like the Herald and Tribune, or from newspapers in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., from which reporters were also dispatched to Harper’s Ferry and Charlestown. In some cases, however, newspapers featured other details, a few of which had substance, while others were based upon transcription errors. To no surprise, details of all kinds traveled across the country, North and South, based upon reprinted newspaper reports. For instance, an antislavery editor in Lisbon, Ohio, published a flawed reiteration of a report originally in the Baltimore Sun. In so doing, he mistakenly transformed raider Edwin Coppic’s racial identification (“white”) into an additional raider named “White.” The same report erroneously stated that both Coppic and Green were from Iowa. This line seems to have been picked up by smaller newspapers across the North, suggesting that it was an error first made in a Northern newspaper.54 In another report, Shields Green was associated with the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In this case, however, the error seems to have traveled south. While it is difficult to be certain as to the origin of this mistake, an early report stating that Green was from Pittsburgh is found in the Evening Star, published in Washington, D.C., on October 19, 1859.55 Within a week of this report, this error seems to have spread among lesser journals in North Carolina and South Carolina, and likely elsewhere in the South.56

However, the Pittsburgh reference is worth considering because apparently it had been confused in reports for Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania, which was linked with initial reports about Shields Green after the raid. Most notably, a journalist from the Baltimore Sun was among the earliest reporters on the scene at Harper’s Ferry, and described Green in two different reports (dated October 19) as “colored, of Harrisburg,” and also as a “free negro from Harrisburg.”57 Likewise, another report in the Baltimore Daily Exchange initially connected Green with Harrisburg. In his first report, however, either the journalist (or the typesetter) misidentified Green as “Gains”—although the raiders’ names sometimes were confused, particularly in those reports made when the smoke was still clearing in Harper’s Ferry. The article thus states that “Gains” had been “induced” by Brown “to come over to Maryland and work for him,” after which he was further “induced to go into the insurrection.”58 The following day, however, the Daily Exchange filed another report, identifying Green by his correct name, and describing him as “a large man” who also went by the sobriquet “Emperor.” The updated description says that Green was “raised in South Carolina” but was from Rochester, New York, and the Harrisburg connection is not repeated.59

Was there any real connection between Shields Green and Harrisburg? One may very well assume that Green’s claim to have been a free man from Harrisburg was a ploy of some kind. It is a matter of record that Green was clever enough to try to elude capture by means of a ruse following Brown’s defeat.60 But when it was clear that he could not pass himself off as a “captured” slave, Green may have changed tactics, telling the marines that he was a free black man from Pennsylvania. However, if the Harrisburg claim was a ploy on Green’s part, it is not clear what he hoped to gain by it as a black man captured as an ostensible insurrectionist in a slave state. Certainly, the Virginians would not have been willing to surrender him to Pennsylvania authorities. Perhaps by associating himself with Harrisburg, Green hoped to avoid connecting Frederick Douglass to the raid; or maybe he merely hoped to avoid any word reaching South Carolina that he had been apprehended in Virginia.

But what if Green was telling the truth and his reference to Harrisburg has biographical significance? In the Pine and Palm article it is stated that Emperor had made friends in Philadelphia. While it is possible that the reference to Philadelphia is an error, Green may very well have gone there after landing in New York City. Indeed, his possible connection to Harrisburg is interesting, not only given the unusual profile of that city in the antebellum era, but also because there is a well-documented underground railroad connection between Philadelphia and Harrisburg.61

Harrisburg was not a typical Northern city in the 1850s. Although it benefitted from trading on the Susquehanna River, Harrisburg was far more political than commercial in outlook. At the same time, it had become appealing to settlers, both white and black, because of its accessibility by canal and railway. While the majority of its citizens were white, African Americans in Emperor’s time numbered significantly in Harrisburg, being the city with the leading black population in the state. Considering the importance of Harrisburg to blacks in the antebellum era, it may be that Green had some real connection there, just as he claimed to have had free parents in South Carolina.

As the preferred residence for many blacks in Pennsylvania, Harrisburg saw its African American population reach nearly thirteen thousand prior to the Civil War. Although Pennsylvania had other smaller black settlements, most of them were isolated communities of color in rural areas largely comprised of freedmen and refugees from the South. In contrast, Harrisburg was the home of a sizable free population and a sanctuary for fugitives. Black and white abolitionists provided safe havens to fugitives, so if he had found his way to Harrisburg from Philadelphia in the 1850s, Green was among a population of escapees from slavery that numbered well over one hundred—no small number for a moderate-sized antebellum town. Unlike other cities in the North, Harrisburg even had its own black cultural area, which developed along Tanner’s Alley (near today’s Capitol Park and Walnut and Fourth Streets), a thoroughfare where free blacks and fugitives from slavery lived and mingled.62

What makes the Harrisburg connection even more interesting is a single contemporary source, a report that was filed by a Baltimore journalist on October 18, the day after Brown’s capture, appearing the following day in the New York Herald. According to the Herald report, a “Negro named Green, who was conspicuous in the fugitive slave riot at Harrisburg some years ago, was among the insurgents” at Harper’s Ferry.63 This reported claim, that Green had participated in a “fugitive slave riot” in Harrisburg, appears only once in the annals of the Harper’s Ferry raid and therefore it is not quite clear how to evaluate it. Should it be dismissed as yet another error, or should it be considered possibly as granting a new insight into Shields Green’s mysterious story? If it was simply an error, it is peculiarly so because the anonymous reporter who filed it would have had no obvious reason to make such a connection. It seems more likely that this Baltimore reporter probably was among the first journalists on the scene following the raid, and that his reference to Green’s participation in a “fugitive slave riot” actually was based upon an interview with him.

To be sure, the Harrisburg connection, if altogether dismissed, would have no immediate bearing upon the record of Shields Green and the Harper’s Ferry raid. On the other hand, if it is retained as a possibility, then the conventional chronology would have to be significantly adjusted in favor of a much earlier escape from South Carolina, because the only recorded “fugitive slave riot” in Harrisburg took place in 1850. This again raises the issue of Green’s age, for if he was a young man in his twenties at the time of the Harper’s Ferry raid as typically assumed, then he would have been far too young to have participated in the Harrisburg episode nine years before. But if Shields Green was born in the mid-1820s, then he would have had sufficient time to marry, sire a child, and escape in his later twenties, and would have been in his early thirties by the time of the raid in 1859.

The episode at Harrisburg often has been overlooked in narratives of the antebellum era, perhaps because it occurred just prior to the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in the fall of 1850. As such, it cannot be numbered among the more memorable “rescues” and “riots” that occurred in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, from the Christiana (Pennsylvania) “riot” and “Jerry Rescue” (Syracuse, New York) in 1851 to the Oberlin-Wellington (Ohio) incident of 1858. To be sure, the legal outworking of the Harrisburg incident unfolded after the law was passed. But the incident itself—in which Shields Green may have participated as a young man—actually shows the kind of antislavery resistance that slaveholders wanted to prevent in the first place by a reinvigorated fugitive slave law.64

In the summer of 1850, eight men fled from Clarke County, Virginia, passing through Harrisburg on their way north. Undoubtedly, the underground railroad brought these desperate men to Harrisburg, and likely also to the attention of William A. Jones, the leading black citizen. Jones owned property and ran a popular boardinghouse in the city that doubled as an underground railroad stop. Although five of the fugitives left town, three men remained, only to be apprehended by a party of slave hunters and placed in custody. Less than a week afterward, a committee of black citizens led by Jones was able to bring the three fugitives before a judge on a writ of habeas corpus, and then paid two abolitionist lawyers to represent them.

The judge was apparently sympathetic to the fugitives, permitting the slaveholders only to reclaim the horses that the fugitives had taken. Undaunted, the slaveholders entered the jail after the trial with the clear intention of seizing the runaways. This immediately prompted a response from black Harrisburg. When one of the fugitives was seized, the crowd exploded in anger and pushed forward to the jail. During the struggle, a single man was able to get past an iron fence and liberate one of the three fugitives. While sustaining terrible wounds, the hero delivered him to the sympathetic crowd, which promptly armed him and sent him on his way north.

Unable either to escape or to be rescued by the black community, the other two fugitives remained in the Harrisburg jail under armed guard. Unfortunately, they were incarcerated long enough for President Millard Fillmore to sign the Fugitive Slave Act into law that September—essentially dooming them to be returned to bondage in Virginia. The bitter process was overseen by a notoriously racist state commissioner, the scion of some Northern slaveholding family who considered the black population in Pennsylvania as “a tax and a pest” upon white society. Under his auspices, from October 1850 to December 1851, there were nine incidents involving seventeen blacks, ranging from minor disturbances to exasperating episodes for black Harrisburg. Was Emperor involved in some of these incidents as well? While the African American community responded to this incident by forming an ad hoc committee to aid fugitives under the new law, the tragic “fugitive slave riot” of August 1850 was a harbinger of the last and most desperate decade of the antebellum era.65

Shortly after Emperor’s death in 1859, a journalist inserted a description of the raider in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, suggesting that it was based upon another source. The description is clearly derogatory, but also provocative. According to his source, Emperor “was an ambitious, vindictive, but very illiterate negro of the African species” who had “died a victim to his own brutish impetuosity.” It is easy enough to dismiss these charges, yet for all of its malicious twaddle, the report also states that Green had been “the head and front of all the negro rescues at Harrisburg, for several years past.” Once again, the reference to Emperor’s activities in Harrisburg tends to reinforce the notion that he had revealed this background himself, and that possibly he had some connection to antislavery activities there, although there is no certainty as to what is meant by “negro rescues.”

In 1885 a longtime Oberlinian named Lewis Clark told a reporter from the Chicago Inter-Ocean that Shields Green had also been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. If this were true, it certainly would have put him in the company of John Brown’s other black raiders, John A. Copeland and Lewis S. Leary. A similar claim, that Green had been “a student and citizen of Oberlin,” was made by another author in the early twentieth century.66 However, Green’s alleged connection to the famous Ohio town has no basis in fact. In 1860 James Mason Fitch wrote in the Weekly Anglo-African that Green “was but little known” in Oberlin except by news of his capture and execution in Virginia. Elias Jones, a longtime resident and activist in Oberlin, likewise denied that Green was ever a part of the community. During the antebellum era, Jones had served as secretary of an antislavery society in Oberlin and insisted that Green could never have been part of the community without him knowing it.67

How old was Shields Green when he fled from South Carolina, and what year did he make his escape? What roads had he traveled by the time he knocked on the door of the Douglass residence in Rochester? The conventional narrative portrays Emperor as one who had run away from slavery and then stumbled his way into the historical spotlight by his association with Frederick Douglass. But it may very well be that he was a militant freedom fighter seeking an opportunity to attack slavery—what Manisha Sinha calls a “fugitive slave abolitionist.” Sinha has observed how, in the final decades prior to the Civil War, a new generation of black abolitionists had come to dominate the movement. While Frederick Douglass was the most renowned of this new leadership, Sinha concludes that there were many other self-emancipated slaves who also emerged as leaders.68 Even assuming that Green was not born into slavery, perhaps he had fallen prey to it. His first act of resistance was flight, but like his abolitionist peers, for him freedom entailed more than attaining personal liberty. In this light, Shields Green may be remembered as among the most radical vanguard of the black antislavery movement, rather than simply as an actor in the Harper’s Ferry episode. Despite these interesting possibilities, however, our knowledge of Emperor remains frustratingly uneven—at a few points bright and clear, but at many other points obscure and uncertain, still hidden in the shadows of the past.